Business transactions are increasingly taking place over the Internet and other electronic communication networks. Electronic markets may provide a forum for such transactions, allowing buyers to locate sellers, and vice versa. This process may involve a buyer (or seller) identifying a seller (or buyer) offering to sell (or buy) a suitable quantity of a particular item at a suitable price. Typically, the buyer wants to buy at the lowest possible price, and the seller wants to sell at the highest possible price. Market prices (meaning prices at which transactions between buyers and sellers actually take place) may be determined by the relative buying and selling pressures in the market. These pressures may be in constant flux, causing market prices to change over time.
In a fair market, no particular buyer or seller (or relatively small group of buyers or sellers) may control market prices. As a result, market prices may better reflect actual buying and selling pressure in a fair market. While a fair market may be an ideal market for business transactions, few actual markets are in fact fair markets. In an electronic market, for example, one side of the market may include fewer market participants than the other side of the market, and those market participants may each have a capacity to buy or sell that is substantially greater than the capacity of the individual market participants on the other side of the market to sell or buy. Such a market may be referred to as an “unbalanced” market. In such a market, the larger-capacity market participants on the less populous side of the market may have disproportionate control over market prices (due to their buying or selling power relative to the other market participants), resulting in a market that is not substantially fair.